1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a video image pickup apparatus and an exposure guide display method, and particularly, to a video image pickup apparatus and an exposure guide display method that display information on a luminance detected before a process for “compressing image regions or signal components of a picture signal in a high-luminance interval of an associated signal processing characteristic” (referred herein to as a “high-luminance component compression”, “high-luminance region compression”, or “high-luminance interval compression”, or collectively as a “high-luminance compression”).
2. Description of Related Art
There are generally used video image pickup apparatuses such as video cameras that generate a picture signal based on an output signal as a set of pixel signals from a solid-state image pickup device, such as a CCD image sensor or a CMOS image sensor. Those video image pickup apparatuses are adapted to display a histogram for an exposure guide to permit a grasp of a state of exposure due to an aperture and a shutter speed.
There is a technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 7-38801, which calculates a state of distribution of luminance levels in a taken image, making a graph of a calculated state of luminance level distribution, to superpose on the taken image, to display. There are other techniques disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication Nos. 2003-125240 and 2006-295814, which contrive means of indication of contents of a histogram to be displayed to provide useful information for a photographer.